July:

Humans arrived in Britain
250,000 years earlier than thought. Flint tools found on a beach in Norfolk were probably left by hunter-gatherers who lived on the flood plains and marshes bordering an ancient course of the river Thames

August:

For 48m years, a fungus has been
turning worker ants into zombies, releasing chemicals that alter their behaviour to suit the parasite. In its final act, the zombie ant grasps the underside of a leaf in a 'death grip' – the cue for a spore pod to burst from its head

The
first robot able to show emotions, called Nao, was put through its paces by Guardian science correspondent Alok Jha. Nao has been programmed to mimic the emotional skills of a one-year-old child, learning and interpreting specific cues and responding accordingly

Conservators released the first images of exquisite wall paintings in the cave complex 'Little Petra' at Siq al-Barid in Beidha, Jordan. They spent three years removing two thousand years of soot and grime
to reveal the masterpieces

September:

Stephen Hawking and American physicist Leonard Mlodinow argue in their book The Grand Design that
gravity not God created the universe. Hawking made his name studying black holes. The picture above, taken by the Hubble space telescope, shows a jet of subatomic particles powered by a black hole streaming from the centre of the galaxy M87

Astronomers discovered a potentially habitable planet of similar size to Earth in orbit around a nearby star, shown in this artist's impression.
Gliese 581g is in its solar system's 'Goldilocks zone' – not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to existPhotograph: L. Calçada/ESO

October:

A hundred years after Kipling's Just So story How the Leopard Got His Spots,
evolutionary biologists showed that cats hunting on open, rocky ground by daylight tend to have plain-coloured coats, while those that pounce from rainforest tree branches typically have dappled fur

The Zoological Society of London published a list of 100 globally endangered species, including the pygmy three-toed sloth (above). The miniature sloth, which is confined to a single island off the coast of Panama, is the smallest and
most threatened of all sloths